[The following is a translation of an editorial scheduled to appear in the next issue of Quatrième Internationale, the official magazine of the Internation-
Committee of the Fourth Inal Executive ternational.]
Czechoslovakia, economically the most developed of the workers states, happened to be the least affected by "de- Stalinization." The bureaucratic rigidity engendered economic stagnation. The country fell further and further behind the capitalist countries in technology. In recent years the standard of living of the masses dropped. Al1 social activity stagnated. The Communist party became more isolated from the vital more and forces of the nation, especially the Jouth whose independent creative initiative was completely stifled by the barracks regime.
A part of the state econonic apparatus and also a section of the party apparatus realized that certain changes had to be made and they began to oppose the Novotny leadership. For several months the struggle within the leading apparatus of the party and the demonstrations and demands of the students and intellectuals affected each other reciprocally.
Finally, on the basis of a small majority in the Central Committee, Novotny was removed from his posts, first as party secretary, then as chief of state, and was replaced by Dubcek. The Soviet leaders, to whom Novotny appealed for reinforcement, at first accepted the shift. At the time they saw no danger in the pol-.
icy envisaged by Dubček. He had no intention of leaving the Warsaw Pact, to say nothing of making any change in alliances. Who could think that in the present division of the world a Czechoslovak government could dream of an alliance with West Germany? The Soviet Union had no objection to Czechoslovakia's strengthening its economic ties with the West nor to the introduction of technocratic economic reforms to stimulate the Czechoslovak economy. The Kremlin's acceptance of Dubček's policy in this period shows, if any proof is needed, that some of the arguments advanced against him today are put forward only out of the needs of the moment and were not the real reason for the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The economic and social consequences of the
"democratic reforms" introduced in various workers states have for some time been considered by certain tendencies in the international revolutionary workers movement to indicate that in these countries the danger exists that capitalism can be restored. The international relations maintained by some of these countries toward other workers states, as well as the capitalist states, have reinforced these fears. The case of Yugoslavia appears to them to be typical in this respect. The sympathy displayed by the new leaders in Czechoslovakia toward the domestic and foreign policies followed by Yugoslavia has likewise Ied this fear.
This rightist policy, which is_in large part a reaction to the way the Kremlin acts like a big power toward the smaller workers states, is certainly to be condemned; but it cannot be characterized as restorationist with regard to capitalism. Such a conception implies the possibility of a workers state gradually becoming a bourgeois state, of a noncapitalist economy gradually becoming a capitalist economy. This is nothing but a reformist conception in reverse. There is no capitalism in which a bourgeois class does not hold power, in which there is no private appropriation of the means of production and of the social surplus product. The restoration of capitalism is not possible without a new bourgeois class appropriating the basic means of production and overturning the workers state in order to create a different one to serve its interests. Nothing like that has occurred in Yugoslavia; nothing like that threatened to occur in Czechoslovakia. In Yugoslavia, the strikes in 1966 and 1967, the student demonstrations in June, 1968, showed that although the rightist policies of the country's leaders had introduced grave contradictions into the economy and society, the social forces most attached to socialism were capable of battling this policy lavoring tae petty-bourgeois social LayeIs.